Case study: BLACKHAWK NETWORK

Detect and Mitigate Fraud with Machine Learning using SparkML on EMR

Challenge

Blackhawk Network, a leader in gift and payment card offerings, needed to build a cloud-based Data Lake to run advanced analytics and machine-learning for fraud detection

Solution

Cloudwick data engineers built data pipelines on AWS using data lake and advanced analytics, and cleansed, transformed and saved the data on Amazon S3. Cloudwick data scientist established a machine learning model for batch fraud detection, one of the 17 identified use cases that Blackhawk envisages working on. Blackhawk plans to extend the use of the Data Lake to drive settlements, merchant scoring, rebate forecasting, inventory forecasting and other uses.

For its fraud detection solution, Cloudwick data scientists and engineers built data pipelines on AWS using data lake and Spark machine learning algorithms ; historical data is extracted from the previous five years of the company’s on-premises Netezza data warehouse, and cleansed, transformed and saved to Amazon S3.

Cloudwick engineers build a batch fraud detection use case using relevant features from a previously identified Random Forest (approach to classify a wide range of data) machine learning model and tested for accuracy of prediction using Spark ML on EMR because Spark is an efficient, scalable, and fault tolerant. Once the model achieved accuracy, Cloudwick integrated it into the Spark ML pipeline, where it can be reused on different data sets for ongoing fraud detection.

With the new solution, Blackhawk has replaced its complex, ineffective rule-based framework with an efficient machine learning algorithm that detects fraud quickly. In addition, the scalable and flexible cloud-based data pipelines are extremely cost-effective. Finally, identifying and investigating fraud with machine learning translates into huge savings – both monetary and reputation – for Blackhawk.